How You Can Give Back for WordPress Birthday Month

As many of you know, one of the things that has long been near and dear to my heart is the WordPress Codex, the online manual for WordPress Users. I’m so pleased to be part of the drive in May to get everyone to contribute to the Codex and to celebrate the 8th birthday of the world’s favorite web publishing platform, WordPress.

The WordCast team and I are joining the team of volunteers at to kick off a way you can give back to the WordPress Community through your editing, writing, research, and cheer leading skills.

You can join us for WordCamp Developers in Vancouver, BC, May 5, 2011, and volunteer your time and skills to contribute to the Codex (note: they just lowered the price to $40!!), or you can volunteer virtually to help us clean up, add to, and polish the WordPress Codex to a shine.

You can volunteer by signing up for a task or helping to get it done by volunteering helpful information, tips, or resources.

We aren’t looking for experts in WordPress specifically. Anyone can help. That’s how I got started in 2004 on the Codex. I just corrected one word and I was hooked.

Remember a time when you were bashing your head against the wall and the WordPress Codex had the answer or led you to the solution? We want to help it continue to do that and we need the WordPress Community to make this dream possible.

Maybe you’ve written a WordPress tip or two. Why not give it a dust off and rewrite it to conform to the style and voice of the Codex and give it to the WordPress Community. If you’ve written the definitive work that is directly related to a topic on the WordPress Codex, why not add it to the “More Resources” section. We’re picky about what goes in those references, but your article might qualify.

If you wish to follow along with the fun, the hashtag for the WordPress Codex birthday project is #wpdocs. The hashtag for WordCamp Developers is #WCDev.

Help us say happy birthday to WordPress by lending your words to help people learn more and understand how WordPress works!

If you can type, you can help with the WordPress Codex, so I’m not sure what skills are missing. If you can figure out how to leave a comment, you can contribute to the Codex. You just sign in, if you see a word that is misspelled, you click edit, find it and fix it, click save with a note that you fixed the spelling. How hard is that?

The WordPress Codex is successful because it takes a village to make that way. The majority of my own work on the Codex isn’t writing code but fixing the writing so it reads well. No special skills needed on that!! So come join us.